We’ve spoken often of how the best thing about awards season is that filmmakers are given the chance to talk at length about their films, and not merely on their own, but with each other. THR had a long set of video roundtables late last year featuring many people responsible for some of 2013’s best films, and now the LA Times site The Envelope is getting in on the action.

The director’s roundtable from the outlet features Spike Jonze (Her), Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave), John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks), J.C. Chandor (All Is Lost), Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said) and Paul Greengrass (Captain Phillips), with the crew of directors talking about their early inspirations, reacting to criticism, luck, failure, casting, and far more. Read More »

The National Football League is known for a slew of iconic names, but only one has his name on the championship trophy. When a team wins the Super Bowl, they received the Vince Lombardi Trophy, named after the legendary and innovative coach of the Green Bay Packers. Lombardi coached the Packers from 1959-1967, a run during which they won both the first and second Super Bowls.

Now, writer/director J.C. Chandor (All is Lost, Margin Call) has been hired by Legendary Pictures to write and potentially direct a film based on the most celebrated coach in NFL history. Read More »

Along with dropping temperatures and changing leaves, one hallmark of the summer-to-fall transition is the gradual replacement of action-movie tentpoles with awards season hopefuls at the multiplex. With Labor Day weekend just around the corner, the first posters have dropped for two Oscar contenders coming to theaters in the cooler months.

The first poster, for The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, features director/star Ben Stiller literally walking on air, while the one for J.C. Chandor‘s survival drama All Is Lost drags Robert Redford down into the water. Check them out after the jump.

We don’t see a lot of actors doing solo pieces on film. It takes guts to be the only person projected on a screen for 90 minutes. But in All Is Lost, Robert Redford plays a sailor whose boat collides with an abandoned shipping container, wounding his ship and setting him up for a very difficult time at sea. Redford is the only person in the film, so no one can hear him when he screams the one line in the trailer: “help!”

The film comes from J.C. Chandor, who made Margin Call, and this first trailer makes it out to be very effective, if quietly so. All the splashy review comments from the film’s Cannes debut certainly insist that we watch this. After looking at the trailer a couple times I’m inclined to agree. Read More »

Briefly: There is some diversity of opinion out there about Margin Call, this year’s feature debut from J.C. Chandor. But he’s landing on some critics list as ‘best debut director,’ and now he’s set up another film. The new project is called All is Lost, and it is a sort of wilderness adventure film — “a man vs. nature drama that takes place on the water.”

Deadline reports that one of the comparisons the script is drawing is to the 1972 film Jeremiah Johnson, which starred Robert Redford as a guy trying to live a lone frontier life. Perhaps that’s because Chandor wrote the movie with Redford in mind, and the actor is now in talks to star in the one man show. (The title makes me think of a sort of adventure companion to Margin Call — an after the collapse sort of survival tale.) Sadly we don’t have any more plot details, and searching through interviews with Chandor over the past year I haven’t yet come up with any quotes to offer insight into the film. But if things go well it will shoot in May, perhaps partially in the studio/tank where Titanic and Pearl Harbor were shot.

One of the top 10 screenplays listed on The Black List this year was a script by JC Chandor titled Margin Call.

While I often refer to The Black List as a annual list of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, that isn’t actually the case — the list is compiled with a poll of 300 development executives and high-level assistants, and contains a ranking of the hot screenplays making the rounds in Hollywoodland, which were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2010 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year. Basically, the black list contains the hottest projects in Hollywood that you haven’t heard of yet. Some of the screenplays have been acquired and some are even in production. Margin Call was actually in the can before the list was even released.

“Based on true events,” the film chronicles the final twenty-four hours of Lehman Brothers. Chandor directed the film, which stars Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Zachary Quinto, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore. I always love dramatic thrillers set in an isolated amount of time or one location, and this film seems to fit both categories. Although /Film’s own David Chen seemed to hate the movie, calling it “A Movie About The Financial Disaster That’s a Cinematic Disaster” when the movie premiered at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Watch a trailer for Margin Call embedded after the jump.

At the end of this first weekend of the 2011 Sundance Film Festival there have been two major buys. One was made by Paramount for Like Crazy, one of the most-praised films at the fest so far. (Look for our review tomorrow morning.) And on the other side of the spectrum, LionsGate and Roadside Attractions have teamed up to buy J.C. Chandor‘s debut feature Margin Call, which has garnered some of the poorer reviews of the fest. Read More »

It is safe to say that Margin Call was my most anticipated film of this year’s Sundance Film Festival. Having scored a spot on the buzzed-about 2010 Black List, Margin Call has an all-star cast featuring Kevin Spacey,Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Zachary Quinto. It is also topical, purporting to be based on true events and chronicling the actions of an investment banking firm at the epicenter of the 2008 financial disaster.

Sadly, Margin Call is an unfortunate lesson in what happens when you make a movie that, like The Social Network, features dozens of characters talking intensely at each other for 2 hours, only with none of the skill that Sorkin or Fincher brought to their particular film. Hit the jump for some further thoughts, plus an audio blog I recorded with Laremy discussing the film. (He loved it. I hated it.)Read More »

One of the top 10 screenplays listed on The Black List this year was a script by JC Chandor titled Margin Call.

While I often refer to The Black List as a annual list of the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood, that isn’t actually the case — the list is compiled with a poll of 300 development executives and high-level assistants, and contains a ranking of the hot screenplays making the rounds in Hollywoodland, which were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2010 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year. Basically, the black list contains the hottest projects in Hollywood that you haven’t heard of yet. Some of the screenplays have been acquired and some are even in production. Margin Call was actually in the can before the list was even released.

“Based on true events,” the film chronicles the final twenty-four hours of Lehman Brothers. The movie is set to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with Chandor at the helm and starring Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Stanley Tucci, and Demi Moore. I always love dramatic thrillers set in an isolated amount of time or one location, and this film seems to fit both categories. Check out the first photos from the movie after the jump.

The Black List has been released. The annual list is compiled with a poll of 300 (up from last year’s 250) development executives and high-level assistants, and contains a ranking of the hot screenplays making the rounds in Hollywoodland, which were written in, or are somehow uniquely associated with, 2010 and will not be released in theaters during this calendar year. Basically, the black list contains the hottest projects in Hollywood that you haven’t heard of yet.

Note: The headline is a slightly inaccurate, because a lot of these screenplays have already been acquired (six of the top ten listed), a bunch are in production now, and some have even finished production. One of this year’s top ten screenplays, J.C. Chandor‘s Margin Call, about the last 24 hours at now-defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers is already in the can and set to premiere at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival with Chandor at the helm and Kevin Spacey and Paul Bettany star. The top screenplay om the list, College Republicans, already has Shia LaBeouf and Paul Dano attached to star.

Started in 2005 by a young executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way, who polled 90+ peers to send him their 10 favorite new unproduced screenplays to read over the holidays. The underground list was e-mailed around and quickly became a Hollywood phenomenon. To give you an idea, the top three entries of the 2005 list where Things We Lost in the Fire, Juno, and Lars and the Real Girl. However it should be noted that a warning appears at the beginning of the list:

“THE BLACK LIST is not a “best of” list. It is, at best, a “most liked” list.”

Also, it should be noted that many people in recent years have begun accuse participants for pushing their own/friends clients.